Criminal Justice In The Age of New Professionalism

In 2006, US Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia rendered an opinion in Hudson v Michigan concerning a Fourth Amendment violation case in which he heralded a previously unannounced age of “New Professionalism” for US law enforcement. This new age cited reforms in accountability that would remove the need for civil rights protections as police departments could be trusted to hold those rights in high regard and hold officers accountable for violating the law.

Of course, his declaration of this as the age of new professionalism wasn’t without contention and the term has been cited time and time again when people discuss cases of police misconduct, especially those in which the officers don’t appear to be held as accountable as Anton may hope others believed they would have been. The term even took root through Radley Balko’s running series of “New Professionalism Roundup” reports on police issues titled after this new age of accountability and professionalism.

Sadly, it’s still too difficult to definitively determine just how well police departments are adhering to this proclamation of neoprofessionalism. This is because a vast majority of departments still shroud disciplinary records in a dark veil of secrecy. This is also thanks to new laws in many states that facilitate this lack of accountability through special sets of rights that exist only for police officers.

While efforts like ours, the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP), are trying to lift this veil of non-transparency, those efforts can only be so accurate because of this lack of transparency in the age of new accountability.

However, while our statistics are, at best, a guess at the true extent of police misconduct and how that misconduct is dealt with behind the blue wall of silence law enforcement agencies surround themselves with, our method of statistical data gathering is likely to be fairly accurate at determining how the justice system itself holds law enforcement officers accountable when their misconduct rises to the level of stark criminality.

So, just how well does Scalia’s justice system hold law enforcement officers accountable in his age of new professionalism? We can get a good idea of this by looking at how conviction rates and incarceration rates for prosecuted police officers compares to the same set of statistics for the general population at large.

Thankfully the US DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics does keep track of civilian conviction data, though they don’t do it yearly and the latest data we could find was for 2004. Still, it’s good enough for us to use as a basis of comparison since it’s highly unlikely that these rates have declined significantly since then.

We apply the same criteria to our NPMSRP data as the BJS does to theirs by limiting cases to felonies and excluding sentencing length data for life sentences and death penalty cases. (of which there were 5 life sentences and 1 death sentence in the NPMSRP data set).

While the BJS data is gathered over the course of one full year, the current set of NPMSRP data has been gathered over an 8 month period of time, from April 2009 – November 2009.

By comparing BJS data with NPMSRP data we can see that, of the cases prosecuted, law enforcement officers were convicted at less than half the rate as the general population within what we recorded in 2009.

• BJS General Population Conviction Rate – 68%
• NPMSRP Law Enforcement Conviction Rate – 33%

Furthermore, when convicted, law enforcement officers were sentenced to incarceration less often than the general population by 8%.

• BJS General Population Incarceration Rate – 72%
• NPMSRP Law Enforcement Incarceration Rate – 64%

Finally, when incarcerated, the general population spent 6 times longer in prison cells than their convicted police officer counterparts.

• BJS General Population Mean Sentence Length – 37 months
• NPMSRP Law Enforcement Mean Sentence Length – 6 months

Clearly, this does not appear to be a very promising sign of any age of new professionalism in the way the justice system treats law enforcement officers. Indeed, lady justice in the US isn’t very blind when it comes to dealing with criminal police misconduct.

A few interesting facts did come to light in this latest examination of how the justice system deals with police misconduct though.

First, excepting cases of murder, not a single case of domestic assault resulted in a prison sentence, even when firearms were involved.

Of the 3,825 police officers who were cited in the reports of police misconduct we tracked over this 8 month time period, 34% were criminally charged (1,307).

Next, there was a large deviation in the sentence length data, while the mean sentencing rate was a mere 6 months, the average rate was 48.5 months due to a few outlying cases where officers were sentenced to long stays in prison. This highlights that sentencing leans heavily towards the lower end of the scale for police officers with a bulk of cases resulting in sentences of 1 year or less. (123 to 110 and 153 of 233 being 2 or less years)

Most convictions that resulted in sentences were the result of financial crimes including theft, fraud, and robbery (56). A very-close second were sex crimes (52) and then crimes of non-sexual physical violence (35). Over half of the sex crimes involved minors (28).

Finally, while the conviction rate and the incarceration rates haven’t budged much from when we last compared NPMSRP data with BJS data four months ago, the mean sentencing rates for law enforcement officers dropped by 50%.

Of the life sentences, 3 life sentences were for murder, one was for robbery, and one was for sexual assault of a minor. The single death sentence was for murder.

Again, the NPMSRP data is gathered through monitoring the media for reports about police misconduct. While this method is not as accurate as we would like for determining the true rate of police misconduct in the US, we feel it is very accurate when it comes to how the criminal justice system treats police officers when allegations are serious and credible enough to make it into prosecution, especially since most prosecutors are very hesitant to prosecute police officers because of their close working relationships and co-dependence.

Also, while not every case of misconduct, or even disciplinary action, makes the news because of laws that protect disciplinary records from public scruitiny, the criminal prosecution of a police officer almost always makes it’s way to the press because these are public record and are considered highly newsworthy events.

If there are any questions about the data used to generate this report or about the NPMSRP itself, please feel free to write us at news@injusticeeverywhere.com